Cold Father, Warm Love

"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden

With "Those Winter Sundays", Hayden describes a seemingly cold relationship between a father and son, at least from the child's perspective.  Accordingly, cold imagery pervades the poem.  The father dresses "in the blueblack cold"; the son heard "the cold splintering" at his father's efforts; eventually, the father "had driven out the cold" from the house (Hayden 782).  Such frequent implementation of the word "cold" emphasizes the child's perspective of his father as a distant, emotionally hardened man.  Operating under this mindset rather than analyzing everything his father was doing for him, the boy never offered any word of gratitude.  Even worse, the boy spoke "indifferently to him", showing that in addition to his failure to appreciate his father's attempts at keeping him warm, he did not care about his father at all (Hayden 782).  The boy could not appreciate the warmth behind his father's coldness.  He got up early to drive cold out of their home so that the boy could live comfortably.  The stress of doing so produced "chronic angers" in the father that put off the boy (Hayden 781).  However, in the final lines of the poem, the boy, most likely a man now, perceives the love in his father's actions.  He laments at his misbehavior, asking, "What did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?" (Hayden 782).